#50 - The Lake Shore Limited

The Lake Shore Limited, by Sue Miller (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010)

Jacket summary: "Four unforgettable characters beckon you into this spellbinding new novel from Sue Miller, the author of 2008's heralded best seller The Senator's Wife. First among them is Wilhelmina -- Billy -- Gertz, small as a child, fiercely independent, powerfully committed to her work as a playwright. The story itself centers on The Lake Shore Limited -- a play Billy has written about an imagined terrorist bombing of that train as it pulls into Union Station in Chicago, and about a man waiting to hear the fate of his estranged wife, who is traveling on it. Billy had waited in just such a way on 9/11 to hear whether her lover, Gus, was on one of the planes used in the attack.

"The novel moves from the snow-filled woods of Vermont to the rainy brick sidewalks of Boston as the lives of the other characters intersect and interweave with Billy's: Leslie, Gus's sister, still driven by grief years after her brother's death; Rafe, the actor who rises to greatness in a performance inspired by a night of incandescent lovemaking; and Sam, a man so irresistibly drawn to Billy after he sees the play that so clearly displays the terrible conflicts and ambivalence of her situation.

"How Billy has come to create the play out of these emotions, how it is then created anew on the stage, how the performance itself touches and changes the other characters' lives -- these form the thread that binds them all together and drives the novel compulsively forward."

Opening line: "Because it was still afternoon, because she was in a strange room, because she was napping rather than sleeping ('I'll just lie down for a bit and see what happens,' she'd told Pierce) -- because of all this, she was aware of herself as she dreamed, at some level conscious of working to subvert the dream she was having, to make it come out another way, different from the way it seemed to be headed."

My take: Clearly, I liked this one; it's been a while since I've read a novel in one sitting, though it has happened and I do enjoy me some Sue Miller (and apparently some bad grammar, too).

As noted on the jacket, the novel centers on the play from which it takes its title, and how it resonates with each of the main characters. In an early chapter, we "see" the play open in previews, and learn the story firsthand. Protagonist Gabriel, an aloof, middle-aged college professor type, is enjoying his solitude at home (pointedly ignoring the phone, where a mysterious woman's voice tells him they have to talk) when his grown son Alex arrives in a panicked rage, banging on the door, outraged that his father hasn't yet heard about the terrorist bombing of the train that's carrying Gabriel's wife and Alex's mother, Elizabeth, back home. Alex and his wife grow frustrated and then furious at Gabriel's taking the news so calmly, but the truth is, he's not sure how to react. Their marriage, at least lately, has been a rocky one, and we learn that Gabriel's been having an affair. Though he admits it only reluctantly, he does think for the briefest moment that Elizabeth's death would relieve him of the painful decisions before him, and free him to pursue happiness with his mistress, Anita, if indeed that's what he wants. Hours later, when a badly bruised but very much alive Elizabeth walks in the front door, Gabriel speaks her name with an excruciating mix of joy and regret.

Perhaps no one understands Gabriel's complicated feelings better than his creator, playwright Billy, who lost her lover Gus in the 9/11 attacks several years earlier. Leslie, Gus's heartbroken sister, seeks solace and companionship with someone who shares her grief, and insists on Billy's playing a starring role in several memorial events, introducing her as Gus's fiancee and demanding that she accept a share of the victim's compensation money she ultimately receives. Leslie's generous grief, though, coupled with the public nature of Gus's death, makes Billy loath to admit the truth: she'd known for weeks, possibly months, that she wasn't in love with Gus, and had planned to leave him once he returned from the trip that ended so abruptly.

Leslie, although she's come to Boston and the play partly to give Billy permission to "move on" and begin dating again (despite Pierce's gentle suggestions that Billy may have given herself said permission years earlier), and even to introduce a suitable prospect (her old friend and one-time crush, Sam), is stunned to see this played out on the stage. Did Billy really not love Gus at all? Did she feel just a flicker of relief at his death? While Leslie adores Billy and seems almost desperate to maintain their connection, she begins to wonder exactly what this connection means for both of them.

Despite their initial bemusement and mild irritation at being so obviously "set up" by Leslie, Sam and Billy do find themselves drawn to one another. For Sam, the response comes almost immediately after seeing the play, and then meeting the unexpectedly warm and welcoming playwright. He himself is no stranger to complex relationships, having lost his first wife to cancer while their three sons were still children; his second, the lovely but snobbish Claire, to divorce scarce months after their "dream home" was completed; and his grown children, well ... they're all alive, but let's just say it's complicated. For Billy, the attraction begins later, when an innocuous walk-in-the-park date leads to a fall, a broken wrist, and a trip to the emergency room that show her what Sam is made of.

Of course, the play's impact hinges on Gabriel's reaction to Elizabeth's homecoming in the final scene. So, as it turns out, does the actor, Rafe's, career. After solid but not-quite-perfect performances in the previews, Rafe nails the closing scene on opening night. He finds himself digging deep into his own reservoir of experience with love, intimacy, and regret; after an on-again, off-again relationship that stretches back to college, his own wife, Lauren, is dying of ALS. His feelings for Lauren are about as convoluted as Billy's for Gus and Leslie, and the night before opening, the two share a single, perfect night that lends the final je ne sais quoi to his performance.

I almost called this book "chick lit at its finest," before I remembered that I was banning that term from my literary vocabulary. Yes, the primary audience for this book will probably be women, and yes, it's primarily about love and relationships. It's still a good book, with believable characters and intriguing questions. An excellent summer read.

#55 - Falling Man

In my last review, I wrote about authors who explode out of nowhere into tremendous popularity. Well, then there are those authors you've heard about for years, but never actually read. Don DeLillo was one of those, until I read Falling Man (Scribner, 2007), and wow -- was this different, and much weightier, than I expected. For some reason, I thought he'd be an entertaining but not terribly serious author of adventure-thrillers, somewhat akin to Nelson DeMille. Well, I was wrong. I don't know firsthand how it compares to DeLillo's earlier books, like Libra and Underworld; I do know most reviewers considered Cosmopolis (his first post-9/11 novel) a disappointment -- but I found Falling Man both powerful and well-written, even literary.

Falling Man is a book about September 11 and its aftermath, as experienced by one otherwise-unremarkable New York City couple. The opening sequence, in which leading man Keith walks away from the rubble of the Twin Towers with an injured wrist and a stranger's briefcase, sets the stage for the gritty and often-disorienting vignettes in which the story unfolds:

"It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night. He was walking north through rubble and mud and there were people running past holding towels to their faces or jackets over their heads. They had handkerchiefs pressed to their mouths. They had shoes in their hands, a woman with a shoe in each hand, running past him. They ran and fell, some of them, confused and ungainly, with debris coming down around them, and there were people taking shelter under cars.

"The roar was still in the air, the buckling rumble of the fall. This was the world now. Smoke and ash came rolling down streets and turning corners, busting around corners, seismic tides of smoke, with office paper flashing past, standard sheets with cutting edge, skimming, whipping past, otherworldly things in the morning pall."

Bleeding and probably in shock, Keith appears on the doorstep of his estranged wife, Lianne, and their son, Justin. While Lianne doesn't know how to react to Keith's resurfacing in such a manner, the two tentatively begin to go through the motions of being a family again, and she wonders whether the mundane arguments that drove them apart have been eclipsed by the looming shadow of the towers. "'Is it possible you and I are done with conflict? You know what I mean. The everyday friction. The every-word every-breath schedule we were on before we split. Is it possible this is over? We don't need this anymore? We can live without it? Am I right?'" At the same time, Justin and his friends process the attacks in their own way, compulsively scanning the sky for planes, and insisting that mysterious bogeyman Bill Lawton (a seven-year-old's take on "Bin Laden") will be back to terrorize them again soon.

Over the weeks and months that follow, Keith and Lianne cope with the upheaval and strangeness around them in their own ways. Lianne, a writer and editor, continues to facilitate a writing group for Alzheimer's patients, and the reader can't help but notice the similarities between their disorientation and that of her otherwise-healthy neighbors after 9/11:

"[Rosellen] could not remember where she lived. She stood alone on a corner near the elevated tracks, becoming desperate, separated from everything. She looked for a storefront a street sign that might give her a clue. The world was receding, the simplest recognitions. She began to lose her sense of clarity, of distinctness. She was not lost so much as falling, growing fainter. Nothing lay around her but silence and distance."

Likewise, Lianne's struggle with the decision to embrace or renounce her faith mirrors the confusion of many New Yorkers after the attacks confounded lifelong habits of skepticism and rationality.

"There was religion, then there was God. Lianne wanted to disbelieve. Disbelief was the line of travel that led to clarity of thought and purpose. Or was this simply another form of superstition? She wanted to trust in the forces and processes of the natural world, this only, perceptible reality and scientific endeavor, men and women alone on earth. She knew there was no conflict between science and God. Take one with the other. But she didn't want to. There were the scholars and philosophers she'd studied in school, books she'd read as thrilling dispatches, personal, making her shake at times, and there was the sacred art she'd always loved. Doubters created this work, and ardent believers, and those who'd doubted and then believed, and she was free to think and doubt and believe simultaneously. But she didn't want to. God would crowd her, make her weaker. God would be a presence that remained unimaginable. She wanted this only, to snuff out the pulse of the shaky faith she'd held for much of her life."

At the same time, Keith, haunted by memories of 9/11, is all but paralyzed by grief, fatalism, and hopelessness. He finds a fellow survivor in Florence, owner of the briefcase he carried out of the rubble, and their shared experience of unspeakable horror leads to a cathartic but joyless affair. After losing a poker buddy in the towers, he is drawn to high-stakes card games in the casinos of Las Vegas, enjoying yet another streak of luck in the midst of the random and surreal.

While Keith and Lianne's ordinary stories, and the language DeLillo uses to describe them, resonated with me, I can't quite say the same for some of the book's other characters. There's a subplot involving Lianne's ailing mother, Nina, and her long-time lover, Martin, whose history as a 1960's radical gives Lianne pause. Maybe I Just Didn't Get It, but this story line didn't seem particularly well-developed to me, and it wasn't clear why it was included or what it was supposed to add to the narrative. Even more baffling, perhaps, is the story of Hammad, one of the terrorists, and the experience that led him from an underground extremist school in Germany to a flight from Boston that never made it to California.

"The world changes first in the mind of the man who wants to change it. The time is coming, our truth, our shame, and each man becomes the other, and the other still another, and then there is no separation. ... There was the feeling of lost history. They were too long in isolation. This is what they talked about, being crowded out by other cultures, other futures, the all-enfolding will of capital markets and foreign policies."

To me, this thread felt almost tacked-on, as if the author felt no 9/11 story would be complete without some look at the terrorists, and thus decided to throw it in there. Hammad's scenes do contribute to an excruciating closing sequence, but otherwise seemed distracting rather than compelling -- possibly because the language DeLillo uses here seems rather clinical, especially compared to the subtle but raw insights he offers into Keith's and Lianne's experiences and emotions. Nonetheless, New York Times reviewer Frank Rich sums up the novel's impact succintly: "In the ruins of 9/11, relationships are a non sequitur. Disconnectedness is the new currency. Language is fragmented. Vision is distorted." If you're prepared to be more than a little unsettled, Falling Man is well worth reading.